Your highlighting and notations should reflect an
“intellectual exchange” between you and the article (i.e., you should be
highlighting key points, as well as writing down questions, comments, and
summaries in the margins).You will
turn in the article (covered with your highlighting and notations) in to me.

> II.Answer the study questions.

Answer the four sets of questions below with thoughtful,
detailed and reflective answers.Turn in a paper copy and use turnitin.com.

1.A) What did
historian Rayford Logan mean when he referred to the Progressive Era as “the
nadir” for African Americans?Cite
examples from the article that support this analysis.B) Do you agree or disagree with his analysis?C)How did various organizations respond to this situation (your answer
should include an explanation of the NAACP and Niagara Movement)?Elaborate.

2.A) Explain, in your own words, the analysis
of the Progressive Era as provided by historians Gabriel Kolko and Robert
Wiebe.B)Accordingly, how would Kolko, Wiebe and other revisionist
historians critique the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (your answer should
cite specific policies or statements attributed to Roosevelt)?Elaborate.

3.A) Why did the author title this article “The Socialist Challenge”?Elaborate.B) What was the IWW (consult your textbook or an online resource)?C) How does the IWW fit into this author’s
understanding of the Progressive Era (think back to the title of the
article)?D) Overall, do you agree or
disagree with the author’s interpretation of the Progressive Era?Elaborate.

4.Write a mini-mini-essay (no more than 150 words) that explores this
question:“When considering the
discussion of the Ludlow Massacre, what biases are evident in the textbook American
Odyssey and Zinn’s Socialist Challenge?”Support your analysis by offering direct quotes from both the
article and your textbook.

Documents

·Choose at least one quote from each source to incorporate into
your mini-mini-essay

·Use actual
quotes from the novel.In doing so,
make sure you follow the guidelines we have discussed regarding quotation
usage:

1.Quotations should be used sparingly, only for color and clarity

2.Quotations should not be merely thrust into the narrative, they
need to be interpreted and analyzed

3.Quotations should be placed in context, meaning the narrative
should clearly identify who and/or what is being quoted.

Positive Example

not as

good

Negative
Example

Historian Howard Zinn blamed the mine owners
for the massacre.“The attack at the
workers’ camp amounted to a outright slaughter” (Zinn, The Socialist
Challenge).

·formal language
that avoids the use of first (I, we, us, our) or second person (you, your)
pronouns

> III.Participate in a graded oral discussion.

Your verbal participation must
reflect a high degree of participation as well as a detailed understanding of
the article.Note:you must have completed the study questions
in order to receive full credit for the discussion.

> DUE:Blue
Day classes - Dec. 1st; White Day classes - Dec. 2nd

-----------------------------

.
. . In this early part of the twentieth century, labeled by generations of
white scholars as "the Progressive period," lynchings were reported
every week; it was the low point for Negroes, North and South, "the
nadir," as Rayford Logan, a black historian, put it. In 1910 there were 10
million Negroes in the United States, and 9 million of them were in the South.
The government of the United States
(between 1901 and 1921, the Presidents were Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard
Taft, Woodrow Wilson)-whether Republican or Democrat-watched Negroes being
lynched, observed murderous riots against blacks in Statesboro, Georgia,
Brownsville, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia, and did nothing.
There were Negroes in the Socialist party,
but the Socialist party did not go much out of its way to act on the race
question. As Ray Ginger writes of Debs: "When race prejudice was thrust at
Debs, he always publicly repudiated it. He always insisted on absolute
equality. But he failed to accept the view that special measures were sometimes
needed to achieve this equality."
Blacks began to organize: a National
Afro-American Council formed in 1903 to protest against lynching, peonage,
discrimination, disfranchisement; the National Association of Colored Women,
formed around the same time, condemned segregation and lynchings. In Georgia in
1906 there was an Equal Rights Convention, which pointed to 260 Georgia Negroes
lynched since 1885. It asked the right to vote, the right to enter the militia,
to be on juries. It agreed blacks should work hard. "And at the same time
we must agitate, complain, protest and keep protesting against the invasion of
our manhood rights.. ,."
W. E. B. Du Bois, teaching in Atlanta,
Georgia, in 1905, sent out a letter to Negro leaders throughout the country,
calling them to a conference just across the Canadian border from Buffalo, near
Niagara Falls. It was the start of the "Niagara Movement."
Du Bois, born in Massachusetts, the first
black to receive a Ph.D. degree from Harvard University (1895), had just
written and published his poetic, powerful book The Souls of Black Folk.
Du Bois was a Socialist sympathizer, although only briefly a party member.
One of his associates in calling the
Niagara meeting was William Monroe Trotter, a young black man in Boston, of
militant views, who edited a weekly newspaper, the Guardian. In it he
attacked the moderate ideas of Booker T. Washington. When, in the summer of
1903, Washington spoke to an audience of two thousand at a Boston church,
Trotter and his supporters prepared nine provocative questions, which caused a
commotion and led to fistfights. Trotter and a friend were arrested. This may
have added to the spirit of indignation which led Du Bois to spearhead the
Niagara meeting. The tone of the Niagara group was strong:

We refuse
to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to
inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults.
Through helplessness we may submit, but the voice of protest of ten million
Americans must never cease to assail the ears of their fellows so long as
America is unjust.

A race riot in Springfield, Illinois, prompted the formation of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910. Whites dominated the
leadership of the new organization; Du Bois was the only black officer. He was
also the first editor of the NAACP periodical The Crisis. The NAACP
concentrated on legal action and education, but Du Bois represented in it that
spirit which was embodied in the Niagara movement's declaration:
"Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty."
What was clear in this period to blacks,
to feminists, to labor organizers and socialists, was that they could not count
on the national government. True, this was the "Progressive Period,"
the start of the Age of Reform; but it was a reluctant reform, aimed at
quieting the popular risings, not making fundamental changes.
What gave it the name
"Progressive" was that new laws were passed. Under Theodore
Roosevelt, there was the Meat Inspection Act, the Hepburn Act to regulate
railroads and pipelines, a Pure Food and Drug Act. Under Taff, the Mann-Elkins
Act put telephone and telegraph systems under the regulation of the Interstate
Commerce Commission. In Woodrow Wilson's presidency, the Federal Trade
Commission was introduced to control the growth of monopolies, and the Federal
Reserve Act to regulate the country's money and banking system. Under Taft were
proposed the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, allowing a graduated
income tax, and the Seventeenth Amendment, providing for the election of
Senators directly by popular vote instead of by the state legislatures, as the
original Constitution provided. Also at this time, a number of states passed
laws regulating wages and hours, providing for safety inspection of factories
and compensation for injured workmen.
It was a time of public investigations
aimed at soothing protest. In 1913 the Pujo Committee of Congress studied the
concentration of power in the banking industry, and the Commission on
Industrial Relations of the Senate held hearings on labor-management conflict.
Undoubtedly, ordinary people benefited to
some extent from these changes. The system was rich, productive, complex; it
could give enough of a share of its riches to enough of the working class to
create a protective shield between the bottom and the top of the society. A
study of immigrants in New York between 1905 and 1915 finds that 32 percent of
Italians and Jews rose out of the manual class to higher levels (although not
to much higher levels). But it was also true that many Italian
immigrants did not find the opportunities inviting enough for them to stay. In
one four-year period, seventy-three Italians left New York for every one
hundred that arrived. Still, enough Italians became construction workers,
enough Jews became businessmen and professionals, to create a middle-class
cushion for class conflict.
Fundamental conditions did not change,
however, for the vast majority of tenant farmers, factory workers, slum
dwellers, miners, farm laborers, working men and women, black and white. Robert
Wiebe sees in the Progressive movement an attempt by the system to adjust to
changing conditions in order to achieve more stability. "Through rules
with impersonal sanctions, it sought continuity and predictability in a world
of endless change. It assigned far greater power to government . .. and it
encouraged the centralization of authority." Harold Faulkner concluded
that this new emphasis on strong government was for the benefit of "the
most powerful economic groups."
Gabriel Kolko calls it the emergence of
"political capitalism," where the businessmen took firmer control of
the political system because the private economy was not efficient enough to
forestall protest from below. The businessmen, Kolko says, were not opposed to
the new reforms; they initiated them, pushed them, to stabilize the capitalist
system in a time of uncertainty and trouble.
For instance, Theodore Roosevelt made a
reputation for himself as a "trust-buster" (although his successor,
Taft, a "conservative," while Roosevelt was a
"Progressive," launched more antitrust suits than did Roosevelt). In
fact, as Wiebe points out, two of J. P. Morgan's men- Elbert Gary, chairman of
U.S. Steel, and George Perkins, who would later become a campaigner for
Roosevelt- "arranged a general understanding with Roosevelt by which . . .
they would cooperate in any investigation by the Bureau of Corporations in
return for a guarantee of their companies' legality." They would do this
through private negotiations with the President. "A gentleman's agreement
between reasonable people," Wiebe says, with a bit of sarcasm.
The panic of 1907, as well as the growing
strength of the Socialists, Wobblies, and trade unions, speeded the process of
reform. According to Wiebe: "Around 1908 a qualitative shift in outlook
occurred among large numbers of these men of authority.. . ." The emphasis
was now on "enticements and compromises." It continued with Wilson,
and "a great many reform-minded citizens indulged the illusion of a
progressive fulfillment."
What radical critics now say of those
reforms was said at the time (1901) by the Bankers' Magazine: "As
the business of the country has learned the secret of combination, it is
gradually subverting the power of the politician and rendering him subservient
to its purposes. . , ."
There was much to stabilize, much to
protect. By 1904, 318 trusts, with capital of more than seven billion dollars,
controlled 40% of the U.S. manufacturing.
In 1909, a manifesto of the new
Progressivism appeared-a book called The Promise of American Life by
Herbert Croly, editor of the New Republic and an admirer of Theodore
Roosevelt. He saw the need for discipline and regulation if the American system
were to continue. Government should do more, he said, and he hoped to see the
"sincere and enthusiastic imitation of heroes and saints"- by whom he
may have meant Theodore Roosevelt.
Richard Hofstadter, in his biting chapter
on the man the public saw as the great lover of nature and physical fitness,
the war hero, the Boy Scout in the White House, says: "The advisers to
whom Roosevelt listened were almost exclusively representatives of industrial
and finance capital-men like Hanna, Robert Bacon, and George W. Perkins of the
House of Morgan, Elihu Root, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich ... and James Stillman
of the Rockefeller interests." Responding to his worried brother-in-law
writing from Wall Street, Roosevelt replied: "I intend to be most
conservative, but in the interests of the corporations themselves and above all
in the interests of the country."
Roosevelt supported the regulatory Hepburn
Act because he feared something worse. He wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge that the
railroad lobbyists who opposed the bill were wrong: "I think they are very
shortsighted not to understand that to beat it means to increase the movement
for government ownership of the railroads." His action against the trusts
was to induce them to accept government regulation, in order to prevent
destruction. He prosecuted the Morgan railroad monopoly in the Northern
Securities Case, considering it an antitrust victory, but it hardly changed
anything, and, although the Sherman Act provided for criminal penalties, there
was no prosecution of the men who had planned the monopoly-Morgan, Harriman,
Hill.
As for Woodrow Wilson, Hofstadter points
out he was a conservative from the start. As a historian and political scientist,
Wilson wrote (The State): "In politics nothing radically novel may
safely be attempted." He urged "slow and gradual" change. This
attitude toward labor, Hofstadter says, was "generally hostile," and
he spoke of the "crude and ignorant minds" of the Populists.
James Weinstein (The Corporate Ideal in
the Liberal State) has studied the reforms of the Progressive period,
especially the process by which business and government, sometimes with the aid
of labor leaders, worked out the legislative changes they thought necessary.
Weinstein sees "a conscious and successful effort to guide and control the
economic and social policies of federal, state, and municipal governments by
various business groupings in their own long-range interest..." While the
"original impetus" for reform came from protesters and radicals,
"in the current century, particularly on the federal level, few reforms
were enacted without the tacit approval, if not the guidance, of the large
corporate interests." These interests assembled liberal reformers and
intellectuals to aid them in such matters.
Weinstein's definition of liberalism-as a
means of stabilizing the system in the interests of big business-is different
from that of the liberals themselves. Arthur Schlesinger writes:
"Liberalism in America has been ordinarily the movement on the part of the
other sections of society to restrain the power of the business
community." If Schlesinger is describing the hope or intent of these other
sections, he may be right. If he is describing the actual effect of these
liberal reforms, that restraint has not happened.
The controls were constructed skillfully.
In 1900, a man named Ralph Easley, a Republican and conservative, a
schoolteacher and journalist, organized the National Civic Federation. Its aim
was to get better relations between capital and labor. Its officers were mostly
big businessmen, and important national politicians, but its first
vice-president, for a long time, was Samuel Gompers of the AFL. Not all big businesses
liked what the National Civic Federation was doing. Easley called these critics
anarchists, opposed to the rational organization of the system. "In
fact," Easley wrote, "our enemies are the Socialists among the labor
people and the anarchists among the capitalists."
The NCF wanted a more sophisticated
approach to trade unions, seeing them as an inevitable reality, therefore
wanting to come to agreements with them rather than fight with them: better to
deal with a conservative union than face a militant one. After the Lawrence
textile strike of 1912, John Golden, head of the conservative AFL Textile Union
Workers, wrote Easley that the strike had given manufacturers "a very
rapid education" and "some of them are falling all over themselves
now to do business with our organization."
The National Civic Federation did not
represent all opinions in the business world; the National Association of
Manufacturers didn't want to recognize organized labor in any way. Many
businessmen did not want even the puny reforms proposed by the Civic
Federation-but the Federation's approach represented the sophistication and
authority of the modern state, determined to do what was best for the
capitalist class as a whole, even if this irritated some capitalists. The new
approach was concerned with the long-range stability of the system, even at the
cost, sometimes, of short-term profits.
Thus, the Federation drew up a model
workmen's compensation bill in 1910, and the following year twelve states
passed laws for compensation or accident insurance. When the Supreme Court said
that year that New York's workmen's compensation law was unconstitutional
because it deprived corporations of property without due process of law,
Theodore Roosevelt was angry. Such decisions, he said, added "immensely to
the strength of the Socialist Party." By 1920, forty-two states had
workmen's compensation laws. As Weinstein says: "It represented a growing
maturity and sophistication on the part of many large corporation leaders who
had come to understand, as Theodore Roosevelt often told them, that social
reform was truly conservative."
As for the Federal Trade Commission,
established by Congress in 1914 presumably to regulate trusts, a leader of the
Civic Federation reported after several years of experience with it that it
"has apparently been carrying on its work with the purpose of securing the
confidence of well- intentioned business men, members of the great corporations
as well as others."
In this period, cities also put through
reforms, many of them giving power to city councils instead of mayors, or
hiring city managers. The idea was more efficiency, more stability. "The
end result of the movements was to place city government firmly in the hands of
the business class," Weinstein says. What reformers saw as more democracy
in city government, urban historian Samuel Hays sees as the centralization of
power in fewer hands, giving business and professional men more direct control
over city government.
The Progressive movement, whether led by
honest reformers like Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin or disguised
conservatives like Roosevelt (who was the Progressive party candidate for
President in 1912), seemed to understand it was fending off socialism. The
Milwaukee Journal, a Progressive organ, said the conservatives
"fight socialism blindly . .. while the Progressives fight it
intelligently and seek to remedy the abuses and conditions upon which it
thrives."
Frank Munsey, a director of U.S. Steel,
writing to Roosevelt, seeing him as the best candidate for 1912, confided in
him that the United States must move toward a more "parental guardianship
of the people" who needed "the sustaining and guiding hand of the
State." It was "the work of the state to think for the people and
plan for the people," the steel executive said.
It seems quite clear that much of this
intense activity for Progressive reform was intended to head off socialism.
Easley talked of "the menace of Socialism as evidenced by its growth in
the colleges, churches, newspapers." In 1910, Victor Berger became the
first member of the Socialist party elected to Congress; in 1911, seventy-three
Socialist mayors were elected, and twelve hundred lesser officials in 340 cities
and towns. The press spoke of "The Rising Tide of Socialism."
A privately circulated memorandum
suggested to one of the departments of the National Civic Federation: "In
view of the rapid spread in the United States of socialistic doctrines,"
what was needed was "a carefully planned and wisely directed effort to
instruct public opinion as to the real meaning Of socialism." The
memorandum suggested that the campaign "must be very skillfully and
tactfully carried out," that it "should not violently attack
socialism and anarchism as such" but should be "patient and
persuasive" and defend three ideas: "individual liberty; private
property; and inviolability of contract."
It is hard to say how many Socialists saw
clearly how useful reform was to capitalism, but in 1912, a left-wing Socialist
from Connecticut, Robert LaMonte, wrote: "Old age pensions and insurance
against sickness, accident and unemployment are cheaper, are better business
than jails, poor houses, asylums, hospitals." He suggested that
progressives would work for reforms, but Socialists must make only
"impossible demands," which would reveal the limitations of the
reformers.
Did the Progressive reforms succeed in
doing what they intended- stabilize the capitalist system by repairing its
worst defects, blunt the edge of the Socialist movement, restore some measure
of class peace in a time of increasingly bitter clashes between capital and
labor? To some extent, perhaps. But the Socialist party continued to grow. The
IWW continued to agitate. And shortly after Woodrow Wilson took office there
began in Colorado one of the most bitter and violent struggles between workers
and corporate capital in the history of the country.
This was the Colorado coal strike that
began in September 1913 and culminated in the "Ludlow Massacre" of
April 1914. Eleven thousand miners in southern Colorado, mostly foreign-born-
Greeks, Italians, Serbs-worked for the Colorado Fuel & Iron Corporation,
which was owned by the Rockefeller family. Aroused by the murder of one of
their organizers, they went on strike against low pay, dangerous conditions,
and feudal domination of their lives in towns completely controlled by the
mining companies. Mother Jones, at this time an organizer for the United Mine Workers,
came into the area, fired up the miners with her oratory, and helped them in
those critical first months of the strike, until she was arrested, kept in a
dungeon like cell, and then forcibly expelled from the state.
When the strike began, the miners were
immediately evicted from their shacks in the mining towns. Aided by the United
Mine Workers Union, they set up tents in the nearby hills and carried on the
strike, the picketing, from these tent colonies. The gunmen hired by the
Rockefeller interests-the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency-using Gatling guns and
rifles, raided the tent colonies. The death list of miners grew, but they hung
on, drove back an armored train in a gun battle, fought to keep out
strikebreakers. With the miners resisting, refusing to give in, the mines not
able to operate, the Colorado governor (referred to by a Rockefeller mine
manager as "our little cowboy governor") called out the National
Guard, with the Rockefellers supplying the Guard's wages.
The miners at first thought the Guard was
sent to protect them, and greeted its arrivals with flags and cheers. They soon
found out the Guard was there to destroy the strike. The Guard brought
strikebreakers in under cover of night, not telling them there was a strike. Guardsmen
beat miners, arrested them by the hundreds, rode down with their horses parades
of women in the streets of Trinidad, the central town in the area. And still
the miners refused to give in. When they lasted through the cold winter of
1913-1914, it became clear that extraordinary measures would be needed to break
the strike.
In April 1914, two National Guard
companies were stationed in the hills overlooking the largest tent colony of
strikers, the one at Ludlow, housing a thousand men, women, children. On the
morning of April 20, a machine gun attack began on the tents. The miners fired
back. Their leader, a Greek named Lou Tikas, was lured up into the hills to
discuss a truce, then shot to death by a company of National Guardsmen. The
women and children dug pits beneath the tents to escape the gunfire. At dusk,
the Guard moved down from the hills with torches, set fire to the tents, and
the families fled into the hills; thirteen people were killed by gunfire.
The following day, a telephone linesman
going through the ruins of the Ludlow tent colony lifted an iron cot covering a
pit in one of the tents and found the charred, twisted bodies of eleven
children and two women. This became known as the Ludlow Massacre.
The news spread quickly over the country.
In Denver, the United Mine Workers issued a "Call to
Arms"-"Gather together for defensive purposes all arms and ammunition
legally available." Three hundred armed strikers marched from other tent
colonies into the Ludlow area, cut telephone and telegraph wires, and prepared
for battle. Railroad workers refused to take soldiers from Trinidad to Ludlow.
At Colorado Springs, three hundred union miners walked off their jobs and
headed for the Trinidad district, carrying revolvers, rifles, shotguns.
In Trinidad itself, miners attended a
funeral service for the twenty-six dead at Ludlow, then walked from the funeral
to a nearby building, where arms were stacked for them. They picked up rifles
and moved into the hills, destroying mines, killing mine guards, exploding mine
shafts. The press reported that "the hills in every direction seem
suddenly to be alive with men."
In Denver, eighty-two soldiers in a
company on a troop train headed for Trinidad refused to go. The press reported:
"The men declared they would not engage in the shooting of women and
children. They hissed the 350 men who did start and shouted imprecations at
them."
Five thousand people demonstrated in the
rain on the lawn in front of the state capital at Denver asking that the
National Guard officers at Ludlow be tried for murder, denouncing the governor
as an accessory. The Denver Cigar Makers Union voted to send five hundred armed
men to Ludlow and Trinidad. Women in the United Garment Workers Union in Denver
announced four hundred of their members had volunteered as nurses to help the
strikers.
All over the country there were meetings,
demonstrations. Pickets marched in front of the Rockefeller office at 26
Broadway, New York City. A minister protested in front of the church where
Rockefeller sometimes gave sermons, and was clubbed by the police.
The New York Times carried an
editorial on the events in Colorado, which were now attracting international
attention. The Times emphasis was not on the atrocity that had occurred,
but on the mistake in tactics that had been made. Its editorial on the Ludlow
Massacre began: "Somebody blundered...." Two days later, with the
miners armed and in the hills of the mine district, the Times wrote:
"With the deadliest weapons of civilization in the hands of savage-minded
men, there can be no telling to what lengths the war in Colorado will go unless
it is quelled by force.. -. The President should turn his attention from Mexico
long enough to take stern measures in Colorado."
The governor of Colorado asked for federal
troops to restore order, and Woodrow Wilson complied. This accomplished, the
strike petered out. Congressional committees came in and took thousands of
pages of testimony. The union had not won recognition. Sixty-six men, women,
and children had been killed. Not one militiaman or mine guard had been
indicted for crime.
Still, Colorado had been a scene of
ferocious class conflict, whose emotional repercussions had rolled through the
entire country. The threat of class rebellion was clearly still there in the
industrial conditions of the United States, in the undeterred spirit of
rebellion among working people- whatever legislation had been passed, whatever
liberal reforms were on the books, whatever investigations were undertaken and
words of regret and conciliation uttered . . .